Agnosticism IS the most dishonest position

[EgoDeath]

No, it’s because he’s mature enough to ignore the insult-slinging peanut gallery, and stay focused on the actual substantive discussions being had. You guys are just butt-hurt because you can’t get a reaction out of him, lol.

Okay... I really must not be explaining myself correctly here, because you really have the wrong idea about how I view this situation and view Bel as an individual. I'd like to unpack what you're saying line by line because I want to be 100% clear about how I think and feel about this.

No, it’s because he’s mature enough to ignore the insult-slinging peanut gallery...

The issue with that statement Lady is that Bel behaves this way regardless of whether anyone is insulting him or not. At a certain point I think people insult because they're sick of him being so slippery. And yeah, it's an unnecessary, and immature reaction to a frustrating set of behaviors. Fair enough.

It sort of just gets to the point where I, and others, apparently, wonder why he's even having these conversations, because whenever someone actually starts to take him to task on specific points, he suddenly finds a convenient reason to ignore the person criticizing his arguments or insists that he's given a sufficient answer when he clearly hasn't. Or, he'll tell you that you're being simplistic and are not worth arguing with. Doesn't matter in the end - the point is he always finds a reason to avoid getting down to brass tacks.

And people are annoyed with it. I'll say that the insults should be curtailed, at least on my part, because there's no good reason for it and it certainly doesn't help tease out a productive conversation.

But this would be the equivalent of me joining a Christian forum, making a sort of vague, hardly hashed-out argument like, "God isn't real because evolution," and then instead of explaining myself specifically when people criticize my argument, beginning to just quote different atheist thinkers, philosophers and scientists, insisting that my opponents don't really understand what atheism is (while failing to properly explain what it is, i.e. you have the wrong answer but I'm not going to give you the right one), and then exiting the conversation when someone starts to take me to task on the ambiguous answers, insisting to them that I've already answered every question they have.

It's nonsense, Lady, and I'm hard-pressed to believe that you don't see through it as well. I know you're smarter than that. I'm not saying Bel isn't an intelligent individual - I think he is. But I'm convinced that Bel doesn't even really understand that vague arguments he uses a lot of the time. At least not as much as he pretends to. If there's no purposeful manipulation going on, then he truly has a lot more to learn about the very arguments that he's trying to make.

...and stay focused on the actual substantive discussions being had.

Now that couldn't be further from the truth. I just don't know what to say here. He does anything except stay on point. Once again, his strategy seems to be to divert the conversation to what Christian thinkers, ones that he prefers, mind you, would have to say, and then insisting that quoting these thinkers if a sufficient way of making his argument, and then refusing to elaborate further. Not sure what else to say there.

You guys are just butt-hurt because you can’t get a reaction out of him, lol.

Okay, now that's just silly, Lady. It really isn't that serious. The only time I tried to provoke a reaction from Bel is when I was doing so to prove a point, which worked wonderfully. In the thread he made about a reading list regarding Christianity, he exposed a clear contradiction in how he thinks about Christianity, which is what I set out to prove. It was a dirty trick, I admit, but it worked.

Outside of that, I don't have some kind of personal beef with Bel. I'm not trying to provoke any reaction out of him except honesty about what he actually thinks. And he's quite good at avoiding that.

This isn't what you're making it to be Lady, and maybe that's because I previously haven't explained myself properly. But when multiple people are seeing the same quality in Bel, it makes me wonder how you can deny it so blatantly. I'm not sure if you just go out of your way to stick up for him because you feel bad about it or what... Regardless, it's a little silly. We're just calling out what we see to be blatantly obvious... And to be honest, these two aren't the only ones who have expressed these same exact feelings about Bel. Multiple people have explained to me in personal messages that they've noticed this about him too. So is everyone wrong about the guy? Or are we maybe all seeing a common thread in his behavior?

C'mon, really. As I've said, I haven't always went about it the most mature way... Fair enough. But that doesn't make the criticisms themselves any less true.